Mobile revolution brings mixed benefits to Brazil

By Naomi Canton, for CNN

Updated 12:41 PM ET, Fri October 19, 2012

Mobile revolution brings mixed benefits to Brazil10 photos

Latin America's mobile revolution – According to telecoms regulator Anatel, Brazil's mobile phone market is the sixth largest in the world. The country accounts for a third of all mobile users in Latin America, with more than 250 million active SIMs.

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Mobile revolution brings mixed benefits to Brazil10 photos

Latin America's mobile revolution – Brazil boasts a rate of more than one mobile subscription per person -- yet many living in the poorest areas, such as the favela (shanty town) complexes of Rio de Janeiro, are without mobile phones.

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Mobile revolution brings mixed benefits to Brazil10 photos

Latin America's mobile revolution – Mobile devices have acted as a fuel for violence and crime in the favelas, where the market for handsets draws on a large supply of stolen phones. Here, special "diretão" SIM cards allow drug dealers to communicate without fear of being traced and make international calls for free.

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Mobile revolution brings mixed benefits to Brazil10 photos

Latin America's mobile revolution – But initiatives such as Viva Favela use mobile devices to directly benefit the residents of the settlements. Images collected on smartphones by citizen journalists create an online documentary of favela life and teach "favelados" valuable media and tech skills.

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Mobile revolution brings mixed benefits to Brazil10 photos

Latin America's mobile revolution – Imitations of well known smartphones are commonly traded on the favelas' "grey market", with brands such as "HiPhone" offering music, touch screens, GPS and digital TV, just like their highly priced rivals.

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Mobile revolution brings mixed benefits to Brazil10 photos

Latin America's mobile revolution – The growth in availability of mobile internet-equipped devices has spread access to the web in parts of the country where 90% of residents are without access to fixed high-speed internet lines. Chinese telecoms company Huawei has signed a deal with the government to bring 4G mobile broadband access to 70% homes by 2014.

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Mobile revolution brings mixed benefits to Brazil10 photos

Latin America's mobile revolution – Across Latin America 98% of people have mobile phone signal. More than 80% of households in the region subscribe to a mobile service.

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Mobile revolution brings mixed benefits to Brazil10 photos

Latin America's mobile revolution – For people living in sparsely populated areas outside the region's major cities, mobile devices are opening up new ways to access banking services, health information and education.

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Brazilian mobile network operators have been in the firing line from the Brazilian telecoms watchdog in recent months following consumer complaints about poor service including calls suddenly disconnecting and customers unable to get a signal.

Blogger Anthony Hurtado also thinks that despite having sky-high tariffs on mobiles and too much legislation and regulation, Brazil will soon see a smartphone revolution.

Meanwhile the favelas, the illegal settlements in Brazil that spring up on the fringes of urban areas, known as shanty towns, which tend to be crowded, lack basic amenities and sanitation, and have informal market conditions, have experienced their own mobile revolution -- but not always a legitimate one.

In the same way that they are havens for "gatos" (illegal connections to legal sources of water and electricity), they have become havens for selling and buying stolen handsets as well as special sim cards that allow you to make international calls for free for three months -- known as "diretão." These are especially popular among drug barons who run their drugs empires using them, according to Mobile Phone Appropriation in the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro, published in New Media & Society.

Brazilian NGO Viva Rio has been running the Viva Favela project since 2001. It started with 20 favela-based community correspondents in Rio and now has more than 300 from across Brazil who produce text, photos, audios and videos about their lives, news and cultural activities for its online magazine and website, read by favela residents.

The cell phone has enabled those residents who cannot read and write well, to participate in the project, by submitting video stories and pictures created on their cell phones -- all at a low-cost as the charity does not have the funds to purchase camcorders, explains Editorial Coordinator of Viva Favela Viktor Chagas.

"Cell phones are a massive platform of inclusion," he says. "With these new technologies there are more and more people producing culture, news and content."

Guilherme Junior, 31, an arts teacher and correspondent for the site, who lives in Bangu, Rio de Janeiro, explains: "We have to make an extra effort to create positive news as the newspapers always show only bad things about our communities."

"We have helped people perceive favelas differently and we have helped favela dwellers identify themselves differently. Favelado had such a pejorative meaning in the 80s and 90s. Now the residents use their identity to strengthen their sense of belonging," Chagas adds.

Viva Favela also trains the residents in how to make films and take photographs on their cell phones.

A photograph and audiovisual workshop that Viva Favela held at the abandoned vandalized movie theater Cine Guaraci in Rocha Miranda in Rio even inspired residents to start a campaign to get it reopened, Chagas says -- and they were recently successful.

The Alô Cidadão! (Hello Citizen!) project which ran until 2009, enabled low-income residents, who often did not leave their favelas because of gang violence, to subscribe and receive free SMS messages each day about everything from community news, job openings and vaccination drives to cultural events that they otherwise would have missed.

It was created by the non-profit Institute Hartmann Regueira (IHR) and funded by Oi Futuro, the social arm of the largest Brazilian telecommunications company Oi and Spring Wireless.

The content was generated from local newspapers and partnerships with community groups and businesses. IHR is now looking at rolling out a new project with Oi using a smartphone application to counteract bullying in schools in the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte.

Rede Jovem, another social project, led by NGO Solidaritas, runs Mobile Rede Jovem: SMS for Social Change, which sends daily messages about job opportunities, cultural events, sports, courses and free public services to members of poor communities.

It also runs WikiMapa, a program, in which favela residents, known as wiki-reporters, use GPS-enabled camera smartphones, with a WikiMapa mobile application, to map unregistered streets and add photos and videos of local points of interest such as hospitals, churches and stores, taken on their cell phones. These are then uploaded to www.wikimapa.org.br.

The project has so far mapped 29 favelas in Rio de Janeiro, funded by Fundación Telefónica, the social investment arm of the Brazilian wireless provider Vivo.

Many slums and low-income areas do not exist on official online maps so the initial goal was to add the narrow, winding, often-chaotic, unregistered streets of the favelas onto virtual maps.

This had a big impact on the favelados.

"This is the only project that we have to identify and cast good things within one of the slums already considered as the most dangerous in Rio de Janeiro" says Camila Santos, 26, a wiki-reporter and resident of the Complexo do Alemao favela.

"The sense of marginalization after not even finding a reference to where they lived on virtual maps has been replaced by a twinkle in their eyes now that they can spot their streets and schools among many other used services locally available," says Natalia Santos, Executive Director of Rede Jovem.

"The results are a strengthened sense of identity and increased self-esteem," she adds.

A little over a decade ago there were about 100,000 phone lines in Nigeria, mostly landlines run by the state-owned telecoms behemoth, NITEL. Today NITEL is dead, and Nigeria has close to 100 million mobile phone lines.